Maybe the sun has been out the whole time

Take a look around.

South Sudan slips closer to genocide daily; the slaughter of Syrian civilians continues; war crimes in Yemen transpire unfettered; peace between Israel and Palestine falters; Russia reverts back to Cold War Era geopolitics; Turkey works to stamp out its fourth estate; North Korea inches closer and closer to a functional nuclear arsenal for its irascible dictator; China grows stronger by the minute, threatening to annex disputed territory in the South China Sea — and that’s just outside our borders. Within them, we’ve got a puerile egomaniac for president (or, if you voted for him, a country on the brink of collapse), a looming specter of terror attacks both homegrown and imported, we lost Prince and far too many others, and the first episode of season 4 of Sherlock was underwhelming.

In other words, the world today trembles under the weight of innumerable calamities, and its knees are about to buckle.

That is the narrative spun (perhaps unconsciously) by journalists — myself counted among them — for whom “serious news” and “bad news” are too often synonymous. None of the above stories are made up, but they dominate news coverage to an extent that obscures any and all traces of progress, misleading the public as a result.

I’m hardly the first to notice this trend. David Bornstein and Tina Rosenberg wrote eloquently about it in The New York Times, and viral data scientist Hans Rosling has made a career of upending the public’s gloomy misconceptions. The crooked, uncomfortable truth is that the world is in better shape than it’s ever been and it’s improving, all while very real, very pressing problems persist.

Sharing evidence to support both of those facts is essential, but not just for maintaining some rosy pipe dream about a defiantly optimistic electorate. We cannot ever hope to solve our problems without examining those that have already been solved with equal diligence. Understanding the shape progress has taken in the past helps us recognize it in the present, leaving us less susceptible to empty promises of radical change and more ready to accept pragmatism, even if it doesn't square well with our immediate experience.

So in my inaugural column for this paper, let me shine my spotlight on some good news and make a promise to do so as often as I shine it on the bad: Average life expectancy (71) is now closer to that of the country with the highest (Japan, 84) than that with the lowest (Swaziland, 49). Improvements in medicine and the quality of life have tempered the population explosion of the past couple centuries, lowering the average number of births per woman to 2.5.

Globally, men 25 and older have spent an average of eight years in school — the number for women in the same age group has risen from 3.5 to 7.1 between 1970 and 2009. What’s more, 90 percent of girls attend primary school, a number that has risen steadily since 2000. And on top of all that, we’ve sliced the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty by half in the past 20 years.

Closer to home, cities like Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Des Moines, Iowa, serve as testing grounds for public policies and social interventions that improve early childhood education, better serve ever-diversifying urban communities and address income inequality, among other things. And believe it or not, the rest of Sherlock was worth the lackluster first episode.

This is a broad look. In the future, I plan to share specific, concrete stories that will make news of progress as tangible as that of incompetence. Perhaps in doing so, I can help spur on the realization that we don’t need to wait for a year (or four) to pass for the sun to come out — maybe it’s been out the whole time and we just need to, every so often, look up.

Champe Barton is a UF economics and behavioral and cognitive neuroscience junior. His columns appear on Thursdays.